I think it's time to committing to mentally separating the blind politics and racism involved in the accusations and the actual possibility that this virus was released as part of a lab accident....
I think it's time to committing to mentally separating the blind politics and racism involved in the accusations and the actual possibility that this virus was released as part of a lab accident. There was a recent post on Tildes about an article on that hypothesis. I mentioned there, that I remember an older article with a similar claim but couldn't find it... well, I found it!
The reason this matters is that this goes beyond blame, it would require rethinking lab security standards and researchers don't like that as it might close off certain techniques.
I haven't read the article you linked, but to play Devil's Advocate, I remember reading this post by a virologist. This was 8 months ago, so there certainly could be things that have...
I haven't read the article you linked, but to play Devil's Advocate, I remember reading this post by a virologist.
[TL;DR]: I am very confident that SARS-CoV-2 has no connection to the Wuhan Institute of Virology or any other laboratory. Not genetic engineering, not intentional evolution, not an accidental release. The most plausible scenario, by a landslide, is that SARS-CoV-2 jumped from a bat (or other species) into a human, in the wild.
The pros and cons regarding the two alternative possibilities—first, that it arose in the field as a natural evolution, as many virologists maintain, or second, that it may have been the consequence of bat coronavirus research in one of the two virology research institutes located in Wuhan that led to the infection of a laboratory researcher and subsequent escape—are equally based on inference and conjecture. The points gathered in this paper can be no more than suggestive. There is no hard scientific evidence to support either position. Both are inferences from circumstantial evidence. The US administration’s political hectoring only assures that it will be very difficult if not impossible to ever find out which is true.
I guess we could hedge a little, putting a few chips on that possibility, but I don’t think we’re ever going to find out. It’s just going to be another lingering question. If there is anything to...
I guess we could hedge a little, putting a few chips on that possibility, but I don’t think we’re ever going to find out. It’s just going to be another lingering question.
If there is anything to be done to make labs safer then it should probably be done anyway without waiting for an answer.
But that’s not our decision. We’re just observers here.
I think it's time to committing to mentally separating the blind politics and racism involved in the accusations and the actual possibility that this virus was released as part of a lab accident. There was a recent post on Tildes about an article on that hypothesis. I mentioned there, that I remember an older article with a similar claim but couldn't find it... well, I found it!
The reason this matters is that this goes beyond blame, it would require rethinking lab security standards and researchers don't like that as it might close off certain techniques.
I haven't read the article you linked, but to play Devil's Advocate, I remember reading this post by a virologist.
This was 8 months ago, so there certainly could be things that have changed/discovered since then. Of additional consideration, someone linked this article, Did the SARS-CoV-2 virus arise from a bat coronavirus research program in a Chinese laboratory? Very possibly. but it ends with this:
I guess we could hedge a little, putting a few chips on that possibility, but I don’t think we’re ever going to find out. It’s just going to be another lingering question.
If there is anything to be done to make labs safer then it should probably be done anyway without waiting for an answer.
But that’s not our decision. We’re just observers here.